There is increasing public demand for augmented (AR) and virtual-reality (VR) human-computer interaction (HCl) systems. As these systems become more common in society, their incorporation into social contexts will also become increasingly important. Users will want to perform their day-to-day interactions, making purchases, sharing experiences, exchanging information, exploring the Internet, etc., seamlessly with their local AR and VR operations. Additionally, users will want to interact with their peers even when their peers operate disparate systems themselves. These systems may exhibit different levels of functionality and may need to facilitate the application of older methods to new AR and VR contexts.
Unfortunately, the granularity of the information needed for fluid and comprehensive AR/VR interactions is not always easy to acquire. Indeed, many systems can only acquire such granularity at the expense of processing time or bandwidth. Until technical capacities can match the ergonomic demands of human users, such social applications will remain unfeasible. Similarly, until AR/VR systems successfully interface with previous generation HCl systems (e.g., web browsers), it will be difficult for users to share experiences at different times and/or different locations.
While the flow and sequence diagrams presented herein show an organization designed to make them more comprehensible by a human reader, those skilled in the art will appreciate that actual data structures used to store this information may differ from what is shown, in that they, for example, may be organized in a different manner; may contain more or less information than shown; may be compressed and/or encrypted; etc.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.